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Alexander Betts Why Brexit happened — and what to do next ?

Alexander Betts has given a TED talk on the UK’s Brexit vote, why it happened, and what to do next.

He argues that “we are embarrassingly unaware of how divided our societies are, and Brexit grew out of a deep, unexamined divide between those that fear globalization and those that embrace it.”

Betts gave the talk just five days after the Brexit vote at the TED Summit in Banff, Canada. He explained, “I travelled to the TED Summit a couple of days after Brexit and got into a conversation with Chris Anderson who heads TED. We agreed it would be constructive to channel our shared frustration into a TED talk and also an interesting experiment to see if I could turn around a TED talk in just 2 days”.

The talk examines what Brexit tells us about the challenges of reconciling globalisation and democracy in a changing world. Suggesting, that Brexit is the result of wider structural changes that we observe across liberal democratic states in Europe and North America, the talk calls for a more inclusive approach to globalisation.

The talk received a standing ovation and has now been downloaded by more than 700,000 people.